Thursday, March 27, 2008

Exercises for new pilots

Here are some more rainy-day practice missions.

Weather and wind: Print off a page of metar/tafs for local airports. Go thru with a pencil. Convert all the times to local. Figure X-wind component for landings on 2 runways there, best and next-best. (Sketch wind and runway angles.) (Look up and translate any unknown weather codes.)(Check airport & other pertinent information, ie. very short runway, obstacles, bad approach.)

Compass turns: Roll two dice. Die one mod 3 = first digit of heading, die 2 =second digit. Third digit = 0. Roll again to get a new heading. Just figure out the answer to one question. Do you turn L or R? Do it again. And again.

Compass turns: Roll two dice. Die one mod 3 = first digit of heading, die 2 =second digit. Third digit = 0. Do as a simulator exercise to turn, time, figure rollout. Or do it on paper. (L or R? Number of degrees to turn? Number of seconds?)